Building on a similar effort in California, Catalyst for Payment Reform is proposing a standardized set of 50 ACO measures. Some of the country’s largest purchasers are taking it to their health plans.

François de Brantes, whose payment reform organization merged with the Altarum institute about a year ago, has been fired. His last day was Friday. An email from Altarum’s president and CEO, Lincoln Smith, that circulated at the institute, said he had “tremendous respect” for de Brantes but after…

The questions: Should CMS increase pay to PCPs for services that they currently provide but are not compensated for, and pay for new services that CMS would like PCPs to perform? Or should CMS pay for demonstration projects that target high-need, high-cost Medicare beneficiaries? CMS’s answer, at least for the time being, is a bit of both.

Once they have the right platforms in place, insurers can layer on predictive analytics, digital medical records, and other innovations that promise to make health care costs more manageable—and in the process make health insurers more competitive with the likes of CVS and maybe, eventually, Amazon.

Value-based health care aims to staunch the excess of volume and intensity of services that fee for service and many employer-sponsored health plans encourage. But it presents as many questions as answers.

Medicare’s jumped in with both feet. Take a look at our in-depth review of BPCI Advanced, a new bundled payment program that’s expected to be popular even though concerns persist about episodes, risk adjustment, and use of quality data.

Mai Pham, MD, Anthem’s vice president of provider alignment solutions, takes the bull by the horns in her riveting interview with Editor Peter Wehrwein. She says that physicians need to accept downside risk.

Our issue looks at the potential and these very real concerns surrounding value-based health care.

Medicare’s new bundled payments program is expected to be popular, despite unanswered questions about the target prices for the episodes, risk adjustment, and use of quality data. Here’s what we know—and don’t know.

Mistreated is a comprehensive and brilliant analysis of American health care by Robert Pearl, the CEO of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group. The book’s subtitle aptly summarizes the author’s point of view: “Why We think We’re Getting Good Treatment–and Why We’re Usually Wrong.”